Zetwerk to appoint ITC veteran Sanjiv Rangrass to company board
- ByStartupStory | September 1, 2022
Zetwerk Manufacturing Businesses, a business-to-business (B2B) contract manufacturing unicorn, said on September 1 that it will nominate Sanjiv Rangrass, an angel investor in the company, to its board of directors. Rangrass will join Zetwerk as an independent director and board member, according to a statement from the company. Rangrass, the former CEO of ITC Ltd.’s Agribusiness sector, will be vital in creating the company’s culture and practices, according to the B2B startup.
Surprisingly, the majority of Zetwerk’s co-founders previously worked at ITC Ltd., where Rangrass was the CEO. Amrit Acharya, co-founder, and CEO of Zetwerk announced in a letter to the business’s workers that Rangrass, who has been “a teacher and a mentor to Srinath, Vishal, Fateh, and me,” will join the company as its first independent board member.
Srinath Ramakkrushnan, Vishal Chaudhary, and Ankit Fatehpuria are the five co-founders of the 2018 company. Rahul Sharma is also a Zetwerk co-founder. In the letter, Acharya described his first encounter with Rangrass, when he joined ITC Ltd. right out of college. He stated that his first project with Rangrass was to construct a compound wall for the company’s office in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh.
“I was a newly graduated electrical engineer, and my first impulse was to protest! “I had no idea how to build a wall,” he admitted. He did, however, reflect that the endeavor helped him learn a lot. “Once I completed, Rangy sir remarked, “You now know how to build a wall; now go build an entire factory!” and I began my next duty of assisting ITC in setting up a plant in Mysore. “I was managing budgets in the hundreds of crores and individuals twice my age; I was only 22 years old. “For the first time, I fell in love with manufacturing.”
Acharya’s B2B unicorn, Zetwerk, offers small and medium-sized businesses fabrication, machining, casting, and forging services. The company entered the coveted unicorn club in August of last year, when it raised $150 million, headed by D1 Capital Partners, valuing it at $1.33 billion. A unicorn is a startup worth more than a billion dollars. The company is currently valued at $2.7 billion.
Rangrass began his career as a trainee at ITC Ltd. and rose through the ranks to become the CEO of the company’s agriculture segment. Notably, Zetwerk is now known for hiring a large number of its employees from ITC Ltd. Rangrass stepped down as the conglomerate’s group leader for research and development (R&D), sustainability, and projects in June 2022. Rangrass, according to Zetwerk, is also an active investor who has made angel investments in several firms, including the B2B manufacturing unicorn.
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